Incumbent Russian leader Vladimir Putin is set to secure a resounding victory in the Russian presidential election, according to partial results made public by the electoral commission.

Vladimir Putin is now leading with 76.22 percent of the vote, well above the simple majority needed to avoid a run-off.

First-time Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin is running second with 13.28 percent, while veteran nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who first ran against Boris Yeltsin in 1991, rounds out the top three with about six percent.

Comment: 6 more years!

The free peoples of the Earth salute you, Vladimir Vladimirovich!

We salute your victories past, present and future!

Hurrah!

Update 0100 CET 19 Mar 2018

Turnout is now estimated at 67%, and Putin's share of the vote at 76.5%.

According to Interfax,

Putin's campaign spokesman thanked the UK government for increasing the turn out in the Russian Presidential election today:

"We need to say thank you to Great Britain because they again misread the Russian mindset."

Russia's comeback to the world scene as an equitable partner that defies dictating and ultimatums causes a nervous reaction from the West, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the forum Russia - A Country of Opportunities on Thursday.

"There has been a very nervous reaction to Russia's comeback as an equitable partner who does not impose anything on others but does not tolerate dictating or ultimatums. Our western partners' reaction to this is very painful," he said.

"To no avail," Lavrov went on to say. "We do not seek confrontation with anybody. We wish to cooperate with all on equitable terms, on the basis of mutual respect and search for a balance of interest and mutually acceptable approaches."

The gist of what is happening is the "categorical reluctance of the United States and its western allies to agree that the 500-year-long period of western domination in world affairs is coming to an end." In his opinion, transition to a new, multipolar, democratic and fair world order will last long, but already now this transition is painful for those who "are in the habit of ruling the world for centuries."

"They are in the habit of ruling the roost," Lavrov said.

Russia's response to London's measures against Moscow will follow very soon, Lavrov stressed.

Britain's abandonment of due process has taken a dangerous and reckless leap, with Theresa May declaring economic sanctions and diplomatic expulsions for Russia's "failure" to respond to allegations over the Skripal poisoning.

Provocatively, Moscow was given a 24-hour deadline to "answer" charges leveled by the British government that it was responsible for the attempted murder of a Russian double agent, Sergei Skripal, who had been living in England since 2010 after a spy-swap deal.

Skripal (66) and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia were apparently stricken with a deadly nerve agent in his adopted hometown of Salisbury on March 4 while strolling through a public park. The pair have been receiving treatment in intensive care ever since.

Earlier this week, the British prime minister asserted that the chemical weapon used was a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok, and - on that basis - the Russian state was implicated in the attempted murder of the former spy. Skripal had been exiled from Russia in 2010 after he was convicted of treason as a double agent for British intelligence MI6.

On Monday, Prime Minister Theresa May announced that former Russian spy, Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia, were poisoned with "a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia" known as 'Novichok'.

The chemical agent was identified by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down. May referred to the British government's "knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent and would still be capable of doing so" as a basis to conclude that Russia's culpability in the attack "is highly likely."

On these grounds, she claimed that only two scenarios are possible:

"Either this was a direct act by the Russian State against our country. Or the Russian government lost control of this potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others."

The British government's line has been chorused uncritically by the entire global press corps, with little scrutiny of its plausibility.

But there is a problem: far from offering a clear-cut evidence-trail to Vladimir Putin's chemical warfare labs, the use of Novichok in the nerve gas attack on UK soil points to a wider set of potential suspects, of which Russia is in fact the least likely.

Comment: Before you begin reading about what may turn out to be yet another murder of a Russian exile in the UK in order to blame Putin, check out how many Telegraph presstitutes got together to pen this one!

It's all-hands-on-deck aboard HMS Indomitable! The British media-intelligence factory is working overtime on Operation 'Get the World to Hate Putin, NOW'...

Nikolai Glushkov: Yet another 'Kremlin critic' turns up dead in the UK. Is a pattern starting to emerge?

Counter-terrorism police have opened an investigation into the "unexplained" death on British soil of an arch enemy of Vladimir Putin, just eight days after the nerve gas assassination attempt on a Russian double agent.

Nikolai Glushkov, 68, the right-hand man of the deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky, Mr Putin's one-time fiercest rival, was found dead at his London home on Monday.

Comment: Berezovsky was certainly a cretin and a traitor - which explains at least in part why he found safe harbour in London - but his death was almost certainly the work of British, not Russian, intelligence.

A Russian media source said Glushkov, the former boss of the state airline Aeroflot, who said he feared he was on a Kremlin hit-list, was found with "strangulation marks" on his neck.

The inquiry into Glushkov's death was announced hours before a midnight deadline for the Kremlin to explain how Russian-made nerve agent came to be deployed in the assassination attempt on the double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.

And underlying it appears to be a Global Cultural War in which Russia has found itself the prime obstacle in the way of locking down a totalitarian Western-controlled world order ruled by fear and terror.

With the Russian president in the heat of a re-election campaign, Putin sat down to talk with NBC's Megyn Kelly for an interview that enabled him to burnish his credentials to the Russian electorate.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's team swept a doubleheader on March 1, with his mid-day speech claiming strategic parity with the U.S., and then the nightcap duel with NBC's Megyn Kelly. Any lingering doubt that Putin is a shoo-in for another term as President is now dispelled. Putin might consider sending NBC a thank-you note.

As I watched NBC's special, Confronting Putin, Friday evening, I asked myself - naively - what possessed President Putin to subject himself again to what NBC calls a Megan Kelly "grilling," replete with supercilious questions and less-than-polite interruptions, just nine months after his first such "grilling." It then hit me that "grilling" is in the eye of the beholder.

We have no idea what's behind these weird incidents because we're not investigating.

In December, the Defense Department declassified two videos documenting encounters between U.S. Navy F-18 fighters and unidentified aircraft. The first video captures multiple pilots observing and discussing a strange, hovering, egg-shaped craft, apparently one of a "fleet" of such objects, according to cockpit audio. The second shows a similar incident involving an F-18 attached to the USS Nimitz carrier battle group in 2004.

The videos, along with observations by pilots and radar operators, appear to provide evidence of the existence of aircraft far superior to anything possessed by the United States or its allies. Defense Department officials who analyze the relevant intelligence confirm more than a dozen such incidents off the East Coast alone since 2015. In another recent case, the Air Force launched F-15 fighters last October in a failed attempt to intercept an unidentified high-speed aircraft looping over the Pacific Northwest .

A third declassified video, released by To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a privately owned media and scientific research company to which I'm an adviser, reveals a previously undisclosed Navy encounter that occurred off the East Coast in 2015.

Comment:

The future belongs to not only the physically brave but also the intellectually agile.

More specifically, to those aligned with Truth. If you're off in la-la-land about enemies seeking to destroy you here on Earth, and are thus seeking to pre-emptively destroy them, you have no future.

Aside from the incidents themselves, it's curious that the 'UFO problem' is finally receiving sober mainstream media attention. Previously, the only time given it was for ridicule and debunking.

There have long been rumors that the 'deep state' would one day begin some kind of 'disclosure' about 'the alien reality'. And there are two variants of this theory: one is that it would be an actual disclosure of what the secret world government actually knows; the other is that it would be a controlled, 'fake' disclosure for the purpose of retaining control of people's minds.

Vladimir Putin answered questions from NBC anchor Megyn Kelly. The interview was recorded in the Kremlin on March 1, 2018, and in Kaliningrad on March 2, 2018.

Part 1. The Kremlin, Moscow, March 1, 2018

Megyn Kelly: So, thank you very much for doing this, Mr President. I thought that we'd start with some of the news you made today at your State of the Nation Address, then we will move into some facts about you in preparation for our long piece that we are putting together, and then tomorrow when we will have a longer time together, we will talk about more substantive issues together, if that is ok with you.

Vladimir Putin: Fine.

Megyn Kelly: You announced today that Russia has developed new nuclear-capable weapons systems, including an intercontinental ballistic missile that you say renders defence systems useless. Several analysts in the West have said this is a declaration of a new Cold War. Are we in a new arms race right now?

Vladimir Putin: In my opinion, the people you have mentioned are not analysts. What they do is propaganda. Why? Because everything I spoke about today was done not on our initiative, it is a response to the US ballistic missile defence programme and Washington's unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002.

If we speak of the arms race, it began at that very moment, when the United States pulled out of the ABM Treaty. We wanted to prevent this. We called on our American partners to work together on these programmes.

Donald Trump has accepted a personal invitation from the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to discuss the possible denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, but also has vowed to keep sanctions in place until a firm deal is reached.

Following the latest round of successful negotiations between the two Koreas this week in Pyongyang, Kim Jong-un sent a personal invitation to the American leader to discuss improving bilateral ties. After months of saber-rattling between the two leaders, Trump agreed to meet the North Korean leader by May, South Korean National Security Adviser Chung Eui-yong announced at the White House on Thursday, after delivering a letter from Pyongyang to the American leader.

Trump confirmed the announcement on Twitter, noting that "Kim Jong-un talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze," earlier this week. Revealing the context of the intra-Korean negotiations which led to the invitation, Trump added:

"Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time. Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!"

Comment: What a fascinating (and hilarious) development.

The US gets to present this as being the fruit of its 'policy of putting maximum pressure on North Korea', but in fact it's only because North Korea has achieved its goal of nuclear ICBMs capable of hitting the US that the US is finally, after some 70 years, going to discuss 'removing nukes' from the peninsula. And it's being compelled further by the recent peace overtures by and between North and South Korea.

Another thing: all that hype about 'fire and fury' last year?

It was symptomatic of the US no longer having the capability to deliver such to lesser nations! (those with nuclear capabilities that can harm the US anyway).

To understand the underlying military-strategic dynamic on and concerning the Korean peninsula, read this:

It's been six months since the world first lost its mind over James Damore's Google memo, but you'd think the whole thing just unraveled yesterday. Branded by the media as an "anti-diversity" memo when it was leaked to the public, Damore, who was a senior software engineer working at Google at the time, called out PC culture and suggested that Google's difficulties in attracting female employees may not be due to sexism or discrimination, but inherent differences in what men and women find interesting when it comes to occupational preference.

The Google memo hit a nerve for so many reasons-allegations of sexism in tech collided with hot-button issues like feminism, gender ideology and censorship, all at once. In an all too predictable way, the public's condemnation of both Damore and his so-called "manifesto" was swift and incisive. Google's VP for Diversity, Integrity and Governance accused it of "[advancing] incorrect assumptions about gender," and Damore was promptly fired from his job.

Contrary to what's been reported, however, Damore is not a far-right, alt-right misogynist intent of keeping women out of tech. When I had the opportunity to speak with him late last year, he voiced empathy for those who disagreed with his memo, and discussed wanting to reduce polarization between the left and right.